Growing inter-regional trade has created closer ties between a remote.Thai market town near the Burma-Thailand border and the central region of Thailand. With more outside traders — armed with new kinds of goods — coming to trade, the central region, Bangkok in particular, is no longer a strange, faraway land, and Central Thai, which is used in trade, has become a familiar language in the town. Such new economic activities are thus a crucial factor in national integration, and help strengthen the ideology of the modern Thai nation.

Women's involvement in the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) since its establishment in 1930 until they laid down their arms in 1989 contributed much to the strength of the party. Women in the MCP have been presented largely as nurses, cooks, seamstresses, couriers, and wireless/radio operators, but they went through hardship and danger and fought the same battles as the male guerrillas. A few even climbed to the top party posts through hard work, intelligence and personal sacrifice. This paper recovers the role of women in the Malayan communist movement during the Second World War, the Emergency and after by tracing the careers and lives of party heroines / female role models as well as some ordinary cadres. Major questions include the motivations of women who joined the MCP and the challenges they faced in their roles as propagandists, comrades, guerrilla fighters and in the communist villages. This investigation provides more insight into how the revolutionary struggle transformed these Malayan women.

This article investigates new religious movements that have emerged in post-Renovation Vietnam. The formation and development of movements that worship Hồ Chí Minh will be examined through the Way of the Jade Buddha. My analysis of this indigenous movement will discuss its controversial attempts to establish communication with the spirit of Hồ Chí Minh. It is argued that the movement is a channel through which people can empower themselves, seek legitimacy, and promote nationalistic aspirations. The emergence of such movements demonstrates the ongoing millenarian dream of social transformation in the face of the challenges of international integration and the tensions caused by maritime conflicts with China.

The year 1819 is almost universally taken as a seminal date in Singapore historiography. Yet Stamford Raffles’ founding of a British trading post there was controversial from the start. The Dutch and the British haggled as to whether or not Raffles had overstepped his authority, and whether the trading post was legal. From the start, the Dutch demanded that the British quit their occupation of Singapore. During a three-year hiatus in the Anglo–Dutch negotiations (1820–23), Anton Reinhard Falck, the lead Dutch negotiator, decided to drop claims to Singapore in favour of a rearrangement of possessions in the archipelago. Crucially, he concluded that dropping claims over Singapore would not amount to a real loss. Instead, Falck hoped to use Singapore as a bargaining chip to squeeze additional concessions from the British. The Dutch formally relinquished their claim over Singapore in article 12 of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave full recognition and legitimacy to the British post, and sanctioned a breakup of the Johor-Riau Empire with the Singapore Straits acting as a notional dividing line. Earlier studies were substantially based on English-language materials and present the British as dominating the negotiations. The present article, based on Dutch archival materials as well as studies and sources in French, Dutch and English, reveals a fuller story of diplomatic disputes, territorial concessions, errors of judgement, and the triggering of the Dutch empire in the archipelago, in a paper war for the contested space of Singapore.

A seventeenth-century painting, ‘Pieter Cnoll and His Family’ by J. J. Coeman, reveals a number of entry points from which Indonesian histories can be explored. Through a discussion of the painting and its subjects, a variety of issues ranging from VOC (United East India Company) policies and mestizo relationships to gender, labour and legal rights in VOC-controlled ports are discussed.

Founded in 1979, the Thai popular monthly magazine Sinlapa watthanatham aimed to make history, art and culture into areas of contestation against long-established official interpretations, and thus encourage a broad-based readership to reassess their assumptions about Thai-ness. However, the question of magazine sales, the context of the economic boom, and the crisis that erupted in 1997 led the magazine to succumb to consumerism, as well as a conservative ideology.

Despite the dominant role the timber industry now plays in the economy of Sabah, little is known of the development of the industry prior to the Pacific War. The small amount that has been published on the pre-war situation appears in the Malayan Forester, but the destruction of records in Sabah during the Japanese Occupation has greatly impeded detailed research. For the present study the papers of the British North Borneo (Chartered) Company now held in London have served as a source of far more comprehensive information than occurs in the oft-quoted secondary sources. The aim of this paper is to provide the first detailed account of forest policy and administration, and a systematic analysis of the development of the timber industry in pre-war North Borneo.

In the aftermath of World War Two, Malaya saw the emergence of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its attempt to mobilize labour support against the returning British colonial government. The Pan Malayan General Labour Union (PMGLU), later renamed the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Union (PMFTU), was established as a front organization to harness multiracial labour support and to work in close liaison with other left-wing political groups. Trade unions that mushroomed after the War were invariably dominated by the PMGLU and used as tools for the realization of communist political objectives in Malaya.

Considering the importance of the early dates for bronze working technology in Southeast Asia that several of us have been presenting in preliminary reports over the last fifteen years, it is somewhat surprising that there have not been more critical articles published concerning our evidence and interpretation thereof. The primary reason for this is no doubt because final reports of the pertinent sites presenting the relevant data in context have not yet appeared. The great majority of the interested archaeologists are simply awaiting the final site reports before they decide whether our interpretation is reasonable. We are sorry for the great delay in completing the final reports. Speaking of Non Nok Tha, the first site from which excavated data produced early dates for bronze working, the descriptive portion of the research has been completed, the analysis of the data has almost been completed (primarily by Donn Bayard), and it is hoped that the first volume of a two volume final report can be submitted to the press by the end of 1982. The second volume will be totally a data volume, probably published in microfiche.

This article presents an ethnographic investigation of displaced Karen in a border area of northern Thailand, and in particular, the reasons for their enthusiasm for the wrist-tying ceremony. It examines the way in which Karen ethno-nationalists have both influenced this cultural practice and appropriated it. This study argues that Karen nationalist intellectuals invented and reinvented the tradition of wrist-tying by borrowing structure and content from the use of soul-calling for healing and other purposes. The invented tradition is persuasive and efficacious because of its continuities and ties with existing cultural practices. Ordinary Karen participants utilise vernacular elements of the wrist-tying rite — such as sensory experiences through the handling of ritual objects — to assure a well-balanced life and spiritual security.

The expansion of public education is often seen as an effective tool for the promotion of national identity and the mitigation of ethno-religious tensions in diverse post-colonial states. This essay questions such assumptions via an examination of successive Philippine governments' efforts to deploy educational policy as a response to chronic tensions between the nation's Christianised mainstream and a restive Muslim minority on the southern island of Mindanao. It suggests that the expansion of education to foster a cohesive national identity without careful reconsideration of the religious, cultural and political biases inherent in its content is likely to fail in achieving peaceful, cohesive relations between different ethno-religious communities in religiously diverse multicultural states.

Several scholars portray Thai provincial strongmen as having character traits associated with nakleng – ‘tough guys’ – who are violent and ruthless toward enemies, but generous and compassionate toward supporters. Banharn Silpa-archa, the strongman of Suphanburi province, does not fit the description however. His personality is reflected in the way he meticulously – fussily – monitors all local development projects. This surveillance pushes otherwise lazy and inefficient local civil servants to be more diligent in their work. Banharn's domination rests on Suphanburians' appreciation of his non-nakleng-type leadership.

Vietnamese rulers of the Nguyên Dynesty showed considerable interest in foreign military technology. Their adoption and adaptation of this technology constitute an important chapter in the history Vietnam's relations with the West.

Clifford Geertz, in his discussion of the social history of an East Central Javanese town, described how rural migrants attempted to make sense of modern elections and political factions by applying old systems of meanings. As people adjusted to the evolving social conditions of new urban contexts, new knowledge supposedly emerged to order social relations. Yet he observed that in the 1950s this rarely was the case; usually a sense of vagueness and incoherence persisted. Similarly, Geertz's analysis of a Javanese funeral concluded that the ritual “failed” and consequently tensions persisted and intensified as a result of societal and cultural discontinuity; the social and the cultural were moving in opposite directions. Old cultural notions did not tend to give way to new notions more adept at effecting social solidarity. The contest over whose voice, whose sense of self and image of post-colonial Indonesia would prevail eventually culminated in the bloodbath of 1965–66, which marked the abrupt end of the Old Order and the birth of the Suhartoled New Order regime.

This article aims to recover the background to the post-Second World War growth of local art activities, art education and the rise of the professional artist on the island of Singapore and peninsular Malaya. It examines how the transitional period spanning the dissolution of British colonialism and the establishment of two independent nations stimulated unique conditions for the development of local art education and created an amateur–professional artist divide. The promotion and support of fine arts and related activities were in tandem with nation-building strategies that sought to construct a common ‘Malayan’ culture and identity.

Southeast Asia's strategic position in the major pre-modern international maritime route connecting East and West brought inevitable interaction between Southeast Asian peoples and foreign merchants. Initially, foreign merchants were concerned only with passing through Southeast Asia on their way to China or India. Southeast Asian coastal centres (entrepôts) facilitated this trade by providing suitable stopping places for sailors and traders; available to them were food, water, and shelter as well as storage facilities and market places for exchange. Soon, however, Southeast Asian merchants began to supplement demand for Eastern and Western products by substituting the products of the jungles of the Indonesian archipelago for those from other sources, and then built upon this initial incursion to market other indigenous forest products. Foreign demand for Southeast Asian products reached a peak when spices from Indonesia's eastern archipelago began to flow out of the Java Sea region to the international ports in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

This article surveys the reign of Cambodian King Reameathipadei I (1642–58) on the basis of Khmer and Dutch sources, with a particular focus on the monarch's conversion to Islam in the early 1640s. This episode provides an illustration of the pluralism of Southeast Asian societies during the Age of Commerce.

The tawassul is a ritual invocation popularly used in West Java at grave visits and in other Islamic observances. In simple terms, it consists of two acts; the naming of figures who are considered as mediators (wasilah) between a supplicant and Allah, and the making of an offering for the benefit of the mediator. Participants in tawassul hold contrasting understandings of what is achieved by performing it. Furthermore, the invocation is easily adapted for diverse settings while retaining its basic syntax. This multivocality and flexibility provide keys to understanding the popularity of the tawassul as a religious observance for Sundanese Muslims.

I. The Philippine Scripts

In 1593, there was printed in Manila a most remarkable xylographic (wood-block) book, comprising Juan de Plascenia's Doctrina Christiana in Spanish, romanized Tagalog and Tagalog script (see Fig. 1). While there is still some debate as to whether this was the first book to be published in the Philippines, there appears little doubt that it constitutes the earliest extant printed example of any Philippine script.